The State of American Geography
Dec. 20th, 2003 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistAs Amtrak pulls into the Indionapolis train station, a family is standing next to my seat with their luggage, waiting to get off the train. "Indianapolis, Indiana," booms the announcer with a Kentucky twang. The kids are eager to get off the train, and their seeminly exasperated mother is trying to contain them.
The older girl, obviously comfortable in her role of tormenting her younger sister:
"You don't even know your fifty states"
Younger girl: "Yes I do."
OG: name them
YG: ok. Indiana...
OG (interrupting): That's not a state!
Everyone intervenes: Yes, it is!
Older girl opens her moutn and eyes really wide, then shuts her eyes, then continues:
OG: Name the rest
YG: Ok, ok. Indiana, Maryland, Africa, Asia
OG: those aren't states, those are countires. Name them, name the states
YG: Ok, ok. Maryland, Indiana, some more Indiana and some more Indiana.
Their brother: There is only one Indiana
OG: Can you name all your countries? You can't name all your countries.
YG: Yes I can, yes I can. Indiana, Africa, Indianapolis...
OG: That's not a country. The United States is a country. You can't even name all your countries. Can you name all your rivers?
YG: The Pacific Ocean
OG: That's not a river, that's an ocean.
Younger girl, who has obviously not yet mastered the strategy of turning the tables on her sibling, scrunches up her face. They get led off the train, as the older girl keeps repeating: "you can't even name your states or your countries or your rivers or your oceans."
This entry is brought to you in real time from the window seat of The Cardinal train, which is a 25 hour joy ride between New York and Chicago. When I asked my father what possessed him to get me the tickets on a train that goes from New York to Chicago via Virginia and takes 9 hours longer than the usual train I take that merrily bobs through Amish country, Pennsylvania, and when I see Toledo, I know that the end of the journey is in sight, he got flustered and when his reflex denial of "it's the same train you always take" was tripped up before it was out of the gate, he kept repeating that "it's the best train." After a few tautological rounds of "what does it mean that it's the best train?"/"it's just the best" he finally muttered that it is the best train because it was listed first on the page. Oh, my dad's hierarchical, post-Soviet mentality trumping a chronological chart. "Dad, it was listed first because it's the earliest train, it's the first train to leave in the morning." My mom got on the phone and I asked her why dad did this, and she said "this is one of those things that your father does that no one understands." So anyway, the journey is going to clock in at around 30 hours because the Cardinal went missing from Penn Station, but then it turned out it wasn't hijacked or anything, it was just in the yard, 100 feet away from the platform (you'd think I'd be sympathetic, because every day, multiple times a day, I lose my glasses, my cigarettes, my keys and my wallet, always within a 5-foot radius, but I'm not) and that delayed things for a couple of hours, and then because we hit a deer somewhere in Virginia, which keeps happening to me on trains, and for some reason always results in ALL LIGHTS being turned off, and no one telling you what is going on, so then you get people next to you saying loudly things like "all I know is this BETTER NOT BE THE TRAIN OF DOOM" and speculating about hijacking some more. People. Visualize the hijacking of an Amtrak train, especially if the goal is to crash it into a building, since hijacking scenarios in the Midwest are structured along post-9/11 mythological metonymy, rather than conventional logic. Yes, imagine a terrorist squad in Nowhere, Kentucky assuming control of an Amtrak train and then the train will go off the rails, and haul ass through the fields until it encounters and demolishes either the Children of the Corn, or the local Bob Evans (TM). Anyway, it's not getting to Chicago for another 4 hours, and I am hungry, but the Amtrak menu selection horrifies me (especially the meatloaf frozen dinner entree) and also the cafe car seems to be the locale for Amtrak male bonding, dimestore post-"All the Pretty Horses" style, where it is established and mutually validated that, basically, either you go down the Ohio interstate and risk being shot by the sniper, even though whoda thunk it would happen in Ohio, or you buy an acre of land in Virginia and consume cornbread, so I think I am going to skip the eating and try going back to sleep. Usually that's kind of difficult on trains, but luckily![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
totalvirility supplied me with a Vicodin beforehand. So over and out, everyone, the next transmission is expected to originate in Chicago suburbia.
The older girl, obviously comfortable in her role of tormenting her younger sister:
"You don't even know your fifty states"
Younger girl: "Yes I do."
OG: name them
YG: ok. Indiana...
OG (interrupting): That's not a state!
Everyone intervenes: Yes, it is!
Older girl opens her moutn and eyes really wide, then shuts her eyes, then continues:
OG: Name the rest
YG: Ok, ok. Indiana, Maryland, Africa, Asia
OG: those aren't states, those are countires. Name them, name the states
YG: Ok, ok. Maryland, Indiana, some more Indiana and some more Indiana.
Their brother: There is only one Indiana
OG: Can you name all your countries? You can't name all your countries.
YG: Yes I can, yes I can. Indiana, Africa, Indianapolis...
OG: That's not a country. The United States is a country. You can't even name all your countries. Can you name all your rivers?
YG: The Pacific Ocean
OG: That's not a river, that's an ocean.
Younger girl, who has obviously not yet mastered the strategy of turning the tables on her sibling, scrunches up her face. They get led off the train, as the older girl keeps repeating: "you can't even name your states or your countries or your rivers or your oceans."
This entry is brought to you in real time from the window seat of The Cardinal train, which is a 25 hour joy ride between New York and Chicago. When I asked my father what possessed him to get me the tickets on a train that goes from New York to Chicago via Virginia and takes 9 hours longer than the usual train I take that merrily bobs through Amish country, Pennsylvania, and when I see Toledo, I know that the end of the journey is in sight, he got flustered and when his reflex denial of "it's the same train you always take" was tripped up before it was out of the gate, he kept repeating that "it's the best train." After a few tautological rounds of "what does it mean that it's the best train?"/"it's just the best" he finally muttered that it is the best train because it was listed first on the page. Oh, my dad's hierarchical, post-Soviet mentality trumping a chronological chart. "Dad, it was listed first because it's the earliest train, it's the first train to leave in the morning." My mom got on the phone and I asked her why dad did this, and she said "this is one of those things that your father does that no one understands." So anyway, the journey is going to clock in at around 30 hours because the Cardinal went missing from Penn Station, but then it turned out it wasn't hijacked or anything, it was just in the yard, 100 feet away from the platform (you'd think I'd be sympathetic, because every day, multiple times a day, I lose my glasses, my cigarettes, my keys and my wallet, always within a 5-foot radius, but I'm not) and that delayed things for a couple of hours, and then because we hit a deer somewhere in Virginia, which keeps happening to me on trains, and for some reason always results in ALL LIGHTS being turned off, and no one telling you what is going on, so then you get people next to you saying loudly things like "all I know is this BETTER NOT BE THE TRAIN OF DOOM" and speculating about hijacking some more. People. Visualize the hijacking of an Amtrak train, especially if the goal is to crash it into a building, since hijacking scenarios in the Midwest are structured along post-9/11 mythological metonymy, rather than conventional logic. Yes, imagine a terrorist squad in Nowhere, Kentucky assuming control of an Amtrak train and then the train will go off the rails, and haul ass through the fields until it encounters and demolishes either the Children of the Corn, or the local Bob Evans (TM). Anyway, it's not getting to Chicago for another 4 hours, and I am hungry, but the Amtrak menu selection horrifies me (especially the meatloaf frozen dinner entree) and also the cafe car seems to be the locale for Amtrak male bonding, dimestore post-"All the Pretty Horses" style, where it is established and mutually validated that, basically, either you go down the Ohio interstate and risk being shot by the sniper, even though whoda thunk it would happen in Ohio, or you buy an acre of land in Virginia and consume cornbread, so I think I am going to skip the eating and try going back to sleep. Usually that's kind of difficult on trains, but luckily
totalvirility supplied me with a Vicodin beforehand. So over and out, everyone, the next transmission is expected to originate in Chicago suburbia.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-20 09:06 pm (UTC)Best train movie that involves a train being hijacked and crashed into a building: Silver Streak, with Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, and Patrick McGoohan. (dir. Arthur Hiller, 1976)...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 02:35 pm (UTC)what did the train crash into in the movie?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-22 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 02:38 pm (UTC)i'll be back around new year's, when will you be back?
no subject
Date: 2003-12-21 09:34 pm (UTC)